Stanley Kubrick’s last film Eyes Wide Shut
(1999) which was released after his death has perplexed film critics across
the world, many of whom have even delved into the esoteric culture of the past
– like the myths/literature of ancient Greece – to cope with the plethora of
allusions discovered in it. The film is not ‘mass entertainment’ but has
nonetheless been made for a large international audience and this has us
wondering; can something made for such a large audience be as esoteric as the film
has been made out to be? Kubrick was widely celebrated as an auteur at the end
of his career and he could have taken liberties, assumed that there was a ready
audience for his films regardless of whether his intent was fully grasped or
not.

There is a sumptuousness about Kubrick’s film-making which cannot but
entrance, even when the films are slight in terms of what they have to say, and
one finds oneself so enveloped by a mood – as in Barry Lyndon (1975) and
The Shining (1980) – that one does not ask the questions which would
have been immediately asked of something less consummately mounted. Stanley
Kubrick has never been a difficult film-maker – unlike, say, David Lynch – and
his films depend on linear narratives, but so overwhelming are the visual effects
he obtains that one feels satiated even when the loose ends in the plot have
not been tied up. Eyes Wide Shut is one of his most perfect films but if
the explanations offered for it were plausible, there would be a number of
unanswered questions – which are not asked. The film has been marketed as an
erotic thriller but – notwithstanding the nudity and the sex – there is a
studied coldness about it which suggests that its intent is far from erotic.
What follows is a comprehensive reading of Eyes Wide Shut but as
satirical comedy, which may not find favour with Kubrick’s fans since it
suggests that the director is aiming much lower than they imagine he is.

Eyes Wide Shut: Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as Bill and Alice

Eyes Wide Shut, which is set in New
York, begins with Dr Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) and his wife Alice (Nicole
Kidman) preparing to leave for a party thrown by a wealthy patient Victor
Ziegler. They leave their darling little daughter Helena in the care of a
babysitter on their way out. Dr Harford is evidently a successful professional
but their host is much richer and Alice wonders why they keep getting invited
each year to Ziegler’s party where they know no one else. Harford however
discovers that he knows the pianist Nick Nightingale who dropped out of medical
school when they were studying together, to pursue music. In the course of the
evening an aristocratic Hungarian named Sandor Szavost dances with Alice,
attempts to seduce her when she is under the influence of champagne, while her
husband is similarly accosted by two young women – though he is led away by an
attendant to a private room in which their host is having a crisis. A young
woman with whom Ziegler was having sex has overdosed on a combination of heroin
and coke. Bill Harford revives her and gets Ziegler’s gratitude.

Alice dances with a Hungarian gentleman in the party

Back in their apartment the couple discusses
their respective sexual experiences that evening over marijuana. Alice wonders
if her husband would have gone along with the two young women if he had not
been interrupted, and his remonstrations that he has only eyes for Alice –
because he loves her – gets him deep into trouble. We are familiar with Tom
Cruise’s screen persona and Bill declines to admit even imagining himself with
other women, because of his deep love for his wife. Alice is acidic and the
scene concludes when she admits to having been so infatuated with a naval
officer the previous summer that if only the man had wanted her, she might have
given up everything. Unlike Bill’s love for Alice, hers for him does not
preclude sexual fantasies about other men. It is at this point that Bill
receives a call telling him of the death of a patient and he is required to proceed
to the man’s house post-haste.

A patient's daughter expresses her love to Bill

When Bill is led to his dead patient he finds
the man’s daughter Marion alone with her father’s corpse. Her boyfriend Carl,
whom she is due to marry the next year, is not present, and Marion makes use of
the opportunity to kiss Bill fervently and declare her love for him (‘I
love you; I love you; I love you!’). Like other, similar sequences in
the film, Kubrick stages it acerbically. What is to be revealed is held back
while the person voicing it hesitates, seems embarrassed at the
inappropriateness of the utterance before abruptly plunging ahead. In many of
these sequences a woman makes sexual overtures to Bill, who is plainly
ill-equipped to deal with them because of his moral baggage. I venture to add
that if these sequences are wicked in their comic appeal it is not only because
Bill’s prudishness is being mocked; the star’s lily-white screen persona is
itself being made to look foolish. Tom Cruise plays each scene in his customary
way which, given the altered context, is incongruous to say the least. But
Kubrick deliberately enlists this discomfort to illuminate his protagonist’s
naiveté, and there is little evidence that the star understood this aspect of
his role/performance.

Bill accompanies a hooker to her cozy apartment

Bill Harford leaves Marion
when Carl comes in and in the next sequence finds himself accosted by a hooker
and accompanying her to her apartment. The two discuss the price and the
corresponding services offered and $150 is agreed upon circuitously, with the
exact services left to be decided by Domino the hooker. But Harford gets a call
from Alice at this moment and Domino decides that he wants to
leave. The doctor nonetheless gives Domino the promised $150, much against the
girl’s protests. A walk along the pavement outside and the crossing of a few
intersections leads Bill to the cafe in which Nick Nightingale is playing and
this turns out to be a most fateful event. Nick Nightingale reveals that he is due
to perform elsewhere that night and it emerges that there is a secret gathering
of masked and costumed people and Nick Nightingale is required to play there
blindfolded. These meetings have happened many times before but it is always in
a different place. One time the blindfold slipped and Nick saw things he had
never seen before – especially the array of women on display. All this is
revealed by Nick when a call comes to give him a password, which is ‘Fidelio’
this time. Bill knows the password now and he is insistent that he wants to
come along. Nick finally consents on the condition that he gets there on his
own, but Bill needs to get a costume and a mask.

Milich catches his juvenile daughter red-handed

It is now very late but Bill
Harford drives to a place which rents out costumes. The man he knew there has
moved out but the shop is now owned by one Milich, who agrees to rent him a
costume for the usual fee plus the $200 incentive offered by Bill. But just
before the transaction is concluded Milich discovers his underage daughter
half-naked with two middle-aged Japanese men in drag, hiding behind the
furniture. Milich is now caught between concluding the transaction with Bill
and notifying the police about the men but, when he is dealing with both issues
together, his juvenile daughter nestles close to Bill, making her intentions
apparent. Bill, of course, remains unmoved by this new turn and he gathers his
costume and leaves – for the highpoint of the night. It is nearly 2 am and he
is armed with the password ‘Fidelio’.

Nick Nightingale plays the piano blindefolded at a secret gathering

The gathering that Bill
Harford wishes to infiltrate is being held in a mansion some distance away and
he takes a cab to get there. The cab driver agrees to wait for an extra
inducement of $100 and Bill is finally conducted into the exclusive masked
gathering, suitably attired and disguised. What is underway in an enormous,
dimly-lit space is an orgy of some sort. When Bill enters the master of
ceremonies is chanting something in a strange language while Nick Nightingale
plays bars of music blindfolded on an electric organ. The master of ceremonies
is encircled by cloaked and masked women who soon shed their cloaks, revealing
themselves to be naked except for g-strings. Bill tries to blend into the
gathering but, in no time at all, finds he has been spotted as an intruder. A
naked woman in a mask lets him know this first but there have also been other
gazes fixed on him. Within a few minutes, he is summoned by the master of
ceremonies and unceremoniously sent out, the only consolation being that he is
not stripped naked because of the intervention of a masked woman, who takes
responsibility for his future good behaviour.

The master of ceremonies confronts Bill

Back home Bill Harford finds
his wife fast asleep but restless and giggling. When she is woken up roughly,
Alice tells him of the ‘nightmare’ she has been having but there is a hint that
she is not telling him the truth about the dream but concocting an elaborate
one he might be more comfortable with. Bill returns the costume to Milich but
he is now cheerfully transacting with the Japanese over his daughter. The rest
of the film has to do with the threats made to Bill when he tries to
investigate, his visiting Nick Nightingale at his hotel but finding that he has
disappeared in the company of two men, Bill visiting the hooker Domino but
being informed – with the now familiar circuitousness – by an equally
solicitous roommate of Domino having tested positive for HIV. Bill also learns
from a newspaper that a former beauty queen was found dead from a drug
overdose. He suspects that this is the girl from the previous night and this is
later confirmed. Just as he is beginning to have suspicions of a monstrous
conspiracy closing in on him, Victor Ziegler calls him over and explains some
things to him.

Ziegler drops the bomb

“What were you trying to do last
night?” Ziegler asks him. Ziegler was present at the gathering and saw
what happened. He also tells Bill that he was completely out of his depth and
he would understand this if he knew the names of some of the others present. “You
would lose sleep over it,” Ziegler lets him know. Also, Bill’s dramatic
expulsion from the party, with the girl coming to his rescue, was a charade
arranged to put some fear into him. Nick Nightingale did not ‘disappear’ but
was put on a plane back to Seattle. As for the girl who overdosed, she was the
same hooker that Bill saved earlier. Her death was unfortunate but she was an
addict and Bill knew very well that it was inevitable. Bill is left speechless
by Ziegler and the film ends with his returning to Alice and Helena and telling
his wife everything. The two wonder if it was all a dream but there is still a
promise of conjugality for the near future.

Bill returns to Alice and Helena

Eyes Wide Shut is
nominally quite faithful to its literary source, the 1926 novella Traumnovelle
(or ‘Dream Story’) by Arthur Schnitzler, but there are nonetheless elements
in it which make its impact nasty in its comedy. The key element here is the
casting of Tom Cruise in the central role, and making his image the covert
target of ridicule. Apart from the segments I have already described, the
circuitous way in which matters are explained to him, while he waits
open-mouthed, leave the star at a distinct disadvantage. Kubrick also puts in
more than one scene in which Bill Harford is taken to be gay and, considering
that Tom Cruise has consistently played macho roles (Mission Impossible),
this could be a deliberate slight on his masculinity. I am not certain that
this is aesthetically legitimate but that the star is being mocked in the film
has not gone unnoticed by other critics. Here is how the Slant Magazine review
of the film begins: “Misunderstood as a psychosexual thriller,
Stanley Kubrick’s final film is actually more of an acidic comedy about how Tom
Cruise fails to get laid.” Nicole Kidman, on the other hand, is hardly
the butt of humour; a reason may be that the film is a take on American society
and Kidman is Australian. Moreover her persona is much more ambivalent (To
Die For, 1995).

Bill enjoys his time with two beautiful guests at Ziegler's party

But if making Tom Cruise’s
image the target of humour is the focus of the film, a question is how such a
film can pass for ‘art’; is it not reasonable to expect ‘art’ to have something
of larger interest for us? The only way the project can make sense as art is to
regard it in terms of what Tom Cruise represents. If one studies his oeuvre,
one finds that the star has, generally speaking, been an emblem of middle class
aspiration. Many of his biggest hits have focused on young people of integrity
aspiring to top their professions/vocations like Top Gun (1986), about
an air-force pilot, Cocktail (1988), about a business student working
part time as a bartender, A Few Good Men (1992) and The Firm (1993),
which are both set among lawyers and Jerry Maguire (1996), about an
honest sports manager. In Eyes Wide Shut he plays a successful doctor
with many of the same characteristics. To make his happiness complete, Bill’s
little daughter is as adorable as Hollywood ever made children. Bill also has
plenty of money; his affluence and ease with money are things that the film is
always emphasizing. Yet, his exclusion from another realm is more important and
the first inkling we get of this is when Alice asks him why Ziegler invites
them to his parties every year although Ziegler’s circle is hardly their own.
Bill’s answer is particularly instructive, “That is what you get for making
house calls,” he says and it is not with any special irony. Later in
the film Bill tries to break into the orgy but he is immediately spotted,
despite his disguise. There is no way in which an affluent professional like
Bill could belong in the elite and his expulsion is token of this fact. Kubrick
conveys something about the elite here which is also deeply mordant. The only
legitimate participants at the orgy apart from the elite guests are apparently
hookers. One could also argue that Bill’s sexual squeamishness is being presented
as characteristic of his class and it is this squeamishness that grates on
Alice – when she is prepared to admit her own fantasies.

The Zeiglers welcome Bill and Alice to one of their elite social gatherings

Coming lastly to what the
‘elite’ means in Eyes Wide Shut, one could interpret it as the American
plutocracy. It is common knowledge that there are powerful elites on behalf of
which public decisions (including those pertaining to war) are taken; the way
in which participants in the financial scandal of 2008 were let off and/or got
key posts later only underscored this. But while the existence of this
plutocracy is widely known or inferred, it still remains an elusive notion
because how it operates can only be a matter of conjecture. The orgy in Eyes
Wide Shut can hence be understood as representing a middle-class fantasy
about the lives of this class. Kubrick uses a Romanian liturgy, even playing it
backwards, for the music in the scene to be especially weird.

To conclude, Kubrick’s film
can be interpreted fruitfully as a satirical comedy about an affluent
middle-class professional trying unsuccessfully to enter the elite, which has
none of the moral niceties that he himself – as a middle-class American – has.
A statement attributed to Scott Fitzgerald is the following one: “The
rich are not like you and me; they are different.” Bill Harford is
perhaps the kind of naive middle-class American who does not know that the rich
are different.

About the Author:

M.K. Raghavendra is an eminent film critic and researcher and has been the recipient of the National Award for the Best Film Critic, the Swarna Kamal, in 1997. His most prominent publications include Seduced by the Familiar: Narration and Meaning in Indian Popular Cinema (OUP 2008), Bipolar Identity: Region, Nation, and the Kannada Language Film (OUP 2011), and The Politics of Hindi Cinema in the New Millennium: Bollywood and the Anglophone Indian Nation (OUP 2014).Readers, please feel free to share your views/opinions in the comment box below. As always your feedback is highly appreciated!

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Murtaza Ali Khan is an independent film critic / journalist based out of New Delhi, India. He has been writing on cinema for over seven years. He runs the award-winning entertainment blog A Potpourri of Vestiges. He is also the Films Editor at the New York City-based publication Cafe Dissensus and regularly contributes to The Hindu and The Sunday Guardian. He was previously a columnist at Huff Post. He has also contributed to publications like DailyO, Newslaundry, The Quint, Dear Cinema, Desimartini and Jamuura Blog. He regularly appears as a guest panelist on the various television channels and is also associated with radio.